The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [66]
Instead she asked, ‘So where is he now?’ ‘Down the road at number forty-five.’ ‘What? What’s he doing there? Whose idea was that?’
‘Not mine,’ Diane replied. ‘Mrs L came in whilst he was here and she suggested it.’
Myra thought quickly. The last thing she needed right now was a husband, but at least he was only on a forty-eight-hour pass. It was a pity that their interfering busybody landlady had taken it upon herself to get him a bed so close by. That meant she had no excuse for pretending she couldn’t get to see him.
THIRTEEN
‘I don’t care what you say, Jim. I’ve made up my mind. I want a divorce.’
Myra and her husband faced one another across the small shabby parlour, with its smell of disuse and past sadnesses.
‘That’s crazy talk, Myra, and you know it.’
‘You’re the one who’s crazy if you can’t see that the pair of us should never have got married in the first place and that the sooner we go our separate ways the better.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have got married but we did. And even if I was willing for us to be divorced, which I’m not, you can’t get divorced without proper grounds, you know that.’
‘As to that, if it’s grounds you want, then I’m willing…’ Myra began recklessly, and then stopped when she saw the way he was looking at her. Why couldn’t fate be kind to her for once? Any number of soldiers got themselves killed and left their wives widowed with a pension – why couldn’t that happen to her?
‘There’s no point in saying you won’t divorce me,’ she announced fiercely, ‘because there’s no way I plan to go on being your wife. At least that way you would be free to find someone else.’
‘Like you are? Is that what this is all about, Myra? You finding someone else? Or have you already found him?’
Myra’s heart started to thump uncomfortably fast. Jim was getting far too close to the truth.
‘What if I have?’ she challenged him. ‘You can’t do anything about it. I’ve told you, Jim, it’s over for you and me. If you want the truth it was never that much of a marriage anyway,’
‘And whose fault is that? It’s not as though I haven’t tried to please you.’
Another woman hearing the misery and the frustration in his voice might have been moved to compassion but Myra wasn’t like that. She wasn’t prepared to be compassionate about anything or anyone who stood in the way of her own ambitions.
‘There you are, you see,’ she answered triumphantly. ‘You’re more or less saying yourself that we aren’t suited.’
‘Suited or not, we are married,’ Jim retaliated, ‘and married is what we are going to stay. Myra,’ he called, when Myra pulled open the parlour door, ignoring him. ‘Myra.’ But it was too late. She was already halfway through the front door.
Jim watched her hurrying down the street, without giving him so much as a backward glance, and then thumped his closed fist on the arm of the sofa. A cloud of dust rose up from the horsehair filling, making him sneeze. Myra was the very opposite of everything he longed for in a wife, but what could he do? He loved her so much. And he knew that he always would.
Diane could feel the tension the minute she walked into the Dungeon.
‘Any news?’ she asked Pauline quietly.
There was no need for her to specify what kind of news she meant. When she had gone off duty on Saturday the whole of the Dungeon had been seething with rumours and counter-rumours following the news that the long-awaited and dreaded German naval attack, codenamed ‘Rösselsprung’ or ‘Knight’s Move’, was finally about to take place, and that the Arctic Convoy PQ-17 was to be its target.
‘Plenty,’ Pauline confirmed grimly, ‘and none of it good.’ She nodded in the direction of the huge chart table surrounded by grim-faced naval personnel, whilst harassed Wrens were calling out positions and logging incoming information.
‘Just after twenty-one hundred hours thirty last night the First Sea Lord gave orders for the Arctic convoy to scatter following the discovery that the German support ships had moved into Altenfjord ready for Rösselsprung.’
‘And?’ Diane pressed her anxiously. Everyone working in